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After the spectacular failure of the last book club choice, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, I was a bit hesitant to start another book! And then the holidays hit and it was impossible for me to organize another book club and adequately read and prepare for it. So, I’d like to start the book club going again in January.

New Book Club Titles

I’m open to suggestions for the next book. Here’s the list of books that I came up with last year, subtracting the ones we already read!

Willa Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop

Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment

Margaret Mitchell: Gone With The Wind

Earnest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

Rudyard Kipling: Kim

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Toni Morrison: Jazz

Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children

John Steinbeck: East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath

Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence, The House Of Mirth

Would you like to continue with these books or do you have others you’d like to suggest? Preferably ones none of us have read. I’m open to fiction and non-fiction, even though we’ve previously just read fiction.

New Book Club Reading Plan

Also, I previously haven’t had a very good plan for how to go about reading and discussing the books. I know that my friends and family members all read at different speeds, so it was hard for me to gauge how quickly people would read and how often I should post discussion questions. So, here’s what I propose: for the first two weeks of the month, we’ll read the book of the month; then, during the last two weeks of the month, I’ll post discussion questions and we’ll carry on the discussion online over at Novel Thoughts. If you need more time to read, that’s fine and you can continue reading while the discussion takes place, but I think this will help the faster readers plan when they’ll read the book.

I have started a new blog for my book club, Novel Thoughts. All of the old posts from this site that are related to books and the book club are now also on that site. I still have some organizing and re-linking to do, but the site is up and running.

Soon we will be starting up our discussion of Julian Barnes’s book A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. I encourage you to pick up a copy from a fine bookseller or your local public library and begin reading.

I just received my copy today–all the way from England! I wasn’t paying attention, I guess, when I purchased it through an Amazon seller, so I was surprised to get a package with a customs sticker and the value given in pounds. For some reason, the book seems extra-special since it came from England.

I’m excited about reading the book and discussing it with all of you. This time, my Great Aunt Jane will be helping to write the questions, so I’m looking forward to those as well.

What would you say to Eddie when he laments that he accomplished nothing with his life? Discuss what has he accomplished.

For those of you concerned about source attribution, I’m basing some of my discussion questions on those provided by LitLovers, who got their questions from the publisher of TFPYMIH. I sometimes change how they phrase the questions and leave some out, but I’m using them to guide the general direction of the discussion.